I've been playing around with the very few Christmas stamps that I do have. Trying to come up with some different ideas. The last Christmas card I did with the reindeer was brayered, it was time to try a couple of different techniques.
The first card was made with the Christmas Lodge Stamp set. I absolutely love this set and have seen many beautiful cards made with it. I haven't come up with anything of my own that I loved until I created this card. I wanted to try a vintage look, so in order to do that I grabbed my very vanilla cardstock and soft suede cardstock. I've seen the snowflakes sponged like this before and wanted to give it a try. Originally I was going to try and add more snowflakes to the card but it was too much. So because I already had them cut and sponged I thought I would try layering them which really gave it some awesome dimension. I popped them up on dimensionals which gave it a wonderful look. As for the rest of the card, I stamped my images in craft white ink and heat embossed with clear embossing powder. They were stamped on very vanilla. Then I lightly sponged over both images in soft suede ink. Make sure to grab a tissue to clean off excess ink off of your embossed imaged afterwards.
And my second card was made using the Season of Joy Stamp set. I wanted to come up with something different for this one as well. So I went browsing through the internet trying to find some different ideas. I saw the masking idea and I thought this would be a wonderful idea. I used two of my favorite colors for Christmas cards, Night of Navy and Whisper White. I embossed the white with our new Snow Burst Embossing folder. And the little piece of Night of Navy was embossed with our new Stripes embossing folder. For anyone who has not done masking before it's actually fairly easy. I used to avoid this technique and am now comfortable with it I can see myself using it over and over again. I used a sticky note paper for my mask so that it would adhere to the cardstock that I was stamping on but could also easily be removed afterwards. So for this card I used my 3" circle die, I used my 2 1/2" circle punch to punch a hole in the center of my sticky note and centered the smaller circle over the larger one. I centered my stamp over the circle and stamped my image. Then I used my sponge to gently sponge the night of navy ink, filling the circle. I posted this on my facebook Saturday night, Sunday morning I had a request from a friend to make a dozen of them for him to use as Christmas cards. I'm happy to say that by the time I went to bed last night they were done. I was so excited as this is the first time anyone has requested that I make a bunch of cards for them. Hopefully it won't be the last.
